Donald Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro on Saturday 3rd January was as cinematic as it was precise. Its execution was so exact and meticulous that its sheer absurdity seems to have fallen by the wayside in the minds of the MAGA right. The United States government, without the consent of Congress, had invaded a sovereign nation in peacetime to kidnap its sitting president from his home in the middle of the night. This was a plotline destined for NBC’s “The West Wing”; yet even the programme’s directors may have considered it too preposterous for television.
However, this appears to be the future of geopolitics. The world of 2026 is, in no uncertain terms, returning to a more primitive system of imperialism, with the division between its two “hemispheres” eerily resembling an iron curtain. The Western hemisphere will be American, or Trumpian to be more precise, as the tremors from Caracas are soon felt in Greenland, Colombia, Cuba and Mexico. Modelled on the “Monroe Doctrine”, which facilitated the United States’ single-handed domination of Latin America in the 19th Century, Trump’s new “Donroe doctrine” is hardly ambiguous in its naming.
In response, China will rightfully have no qualms about remaking the Eastern hemisphere in its own image. The CCP’s long-held designs on Taiwan may finally bear fruit, with South Korea and Japan left in the no man’s land between two imperial trenches.
The feeble handwringing of the British and European political classes that we have witnessed over the past few days will also continue. Entire states and political unions across the continent are bound to deceive themselves further about the nature of world politics and their spectatorial role within it.
“International law must be followed”, our leaders will recite, too weak to condemn—let alone stop—the new self-appointed King of the West.
It is hugely ironic that the best part of Trump’s life, as star of The Apprentice, was dedicated to convincing viewers that the fictive and the staged were, in actual fact, authentic. It is now everyone else’s turn to convince themselves that the reality of the past few days, and its ramifications, are not as materially terrifying as they truly are.
Venezuela, and Maduro, are mere omens of what is to come. So, what have the events of the past few days actually revealed?
Yank-ing The Wool From Our Eyes
In many ways, Trump has done the citizens of Britain and Europe a favour. For too long, our leaders have exalted a “rules-based international order” which existed only in the minds of its most well-protected, privileged citizens. According to Health Secretary Wes Streeting, it is this order that is now “disintegrating” before our eyes. Large swathes of Britain’s political commentariat agree; peaceful and orderly harmony could only ever have lasted so long.
That harmony, however, meant very little to the millions of Iraqis, Palestinians, Afghans and Libyans whose nations and lives were not spared by the United Nations, International Criminal Court or International Monetary Fund. Nor will it have meant very much to the citizens of the Global South supposedly “helped” by these institutions, such as the Ghanaians and Zambians who, in exchange for debt relief, were forced into mass poverty by the IMF’s free-marketeering “structural adjustment” programmes.
Likewise, Venezuelans themselves have every reason to be sceptical about the suggestion that the world has truly changed. Recent reports that the US Government may seize $60 billion worth of Bitcoin owned by the Venezuelan state is the latest jab in a protracted sequence of violence-by-sanction toward the country and many of its neighbours – a sequence in which the UK itself is also complicit.
The chief difference is Trump’s unambiguity; the President has, for years, been crystal clear regarding his motives and intentions in Venezuela. With the world’s largest oil reserves, the country will serve as the resource-rich jewel in the American imperial crown as soon as the likes of Exxon and Chevron have set up shop. A corresponding blow to the Chinese Communist Party, to whom Venezuela exported the majority of its oil and owes over $100 billion in loans, will make this arrangement even sweeter for the US Commander-in-Chief. But crucially, unlike his predecessors, these are all facts from which the President does not shy away.
In short, Trump’s brazen, unabashed aggression has explicitly revealed a truth that only those nations derided as “third world” have known: the rules-based international order was always predicated on a single commandment: “know thy place”.
What many in the west perceived as the pinnacle of human development – the “end of history” – was actually an inflexible hierarchy mirroring the most unequal of societies. Categorising whole nations into producers and consumers, its “rules” were only ever imposed on the former to serve the latter. There is a reason why the International Criminal Court’s list of defendants excludes the west in its entirety.
Yet Venezuela, having moved to an undeniably flawed but initially highly successful form of state socialism under Hugo Chávez, did its best to prove otherwise by nationalising its oil reserves and vying for economic independence. Although its oil reserves could not save the country from a toxic combination of incompetence and autocracy under Maduro, mixed with the Western sanctions that followed, it is a disgrace that it could not be allowed to chart its own course. Much like Iran in the 1950s, the rewards beneath Venezuelan soil were simply too tempting to leave it be.
Nonetheless, it is refreshing to be told that so bluntly by the man in charge of it all.
The main lesson from Caracas seems to be that, for what once required a “dodgy dossier”, brute force will now suffice.
Europe Hollowed and Britain Bowed
The reaction to Maduro’s capture revealed another key difference between the old colonial order and the new, which lies beyond its two poles in Europe. The world’s former “centre” has undergone a true revolution, one which has taken it, contentedly, from player to spectator. Keir Starmer’s feeble equivocation regarding Trump’s illegal kidnapping of Maduro, and the vague responses from various EU leaders and officials, should serve not as a revelation, but rather as a reminder of that fact.
Britain and its once-close allies have long been American dependents, and that arrangement has, for decades, been of broadly mutual benefit. American security guarantees, formalised by NATO, allowed the likes of Britain and Germany to hollow out their industrial cores, turning to heavily financialised, service-based economies from which a select few reaped vast rewards. Likewise, American companies enjoyed unfettered access to a highly affluent market which became wholly reliant on its produce.
However, such a dependency is always asymmetrical and control, in this case, remained firmly lodged at the White House. It is for this reason that the most vital element of the UK’s national security apparatus, the Trident nuclear deterrent, now relies on American construction and maintenance. Meanwhile, there are currently almost 12 thousand US military personnel and hundreds of intelligence agents deployed in Britain. One of these agents, Anne Sacoolas, so emboldened by Britain’s deferential servitude to her home country, saw fit to depart the UK under diplomatic immunity after fatally driving into 19 year-old Harry Dunn near an RAF base. The extent of Britain’s dependence on American security meant that its personnel could, quite literally, get away with murder.
It is entirely unsurprising, therefore, that the BBC is so petrified of the American President that it bans its journalists from saying what he himself broadcast to the world: that he “kidnapped” the Venezuelan President.
Beyond the “British” military, our American overreliance is stark. An outage of Amazon or Microsoft, both based in Washington State, or Adobe, based in California, proves just as catastrophic on the other side of the Atlantic as it does in Silicon Valley. There is simply no European product or company that can even get near that level of power.
It is entirely unsurprising, therefore, that the BBC is so petrified of the American President that it bans its journalists from saying what he himself broadcast to the world: that he “kidnapped” the Venezuelan President. The deference displayed by Europe’s so-called leaders (and state broadcasters), in their inability to condemn Trump’s actions, runs through the veins of the European continent and will continue to humiliate it.
Consequently, Donald Trump has done us all a favour in Caracas. He has relieved the Global South of the pretence that a “rules-based” international order ever existed. And hopefully, he has shown the UK and the EU that it is time to grow up. As the threat from Putin’s Russia remains, they can be dependents belonging to an unpredictable parent no more.
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